The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of RevolutionBy Mike RapportBasic Books (May 2017)​416 pg.

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure. In particular, he is interested in how “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place, or the city itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.

In New York City, you’re always digging up someone or something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It comes with the territory.

Build a Federal Court complex at Foley Square and discover the African Burial Ground. Start digging for a parking garage at the National 9/11 Memorial site and find a 18th century Hudson River sloop double-parked. This year, a vacant lot slated for a preschool in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is said to be the final resting place of the “Maryland 400”— a battalion of Minutemen who held the line against the British as Washington’s troops barely escaped capture (if the “400” failed, the American rebellion would have ended there).

Tom Glynn’s Reading Publics provides a richly detailed history of the development of libraries in New York City from the first -- the New York Society Library, founded in 1754 as a library for the new King’s College -- to the coalescence of the New York Public Library in 1911. In nine chapters, he examines a variety of institutions, including subscription, circulating, research, and collegiate libraries, giving a sense of the breadth of individual, corporate, and institutional sponsors who founded libraries in the city and the various purposes those libraries were to serve.

New York City’s oldest continuously operating library is the New York Society Library, currently located on 79th St. just east of Central Park. The Library was originally founded in 1754 but was forced to close for fourteen years during the lead up to the Revolutionary War, the British occupation of the city, and the ensuing Post-War depression.[1] It was re-founded in 1789 as part of the larger cultural revival of the city in the 1780s and has been open since. The library has always functioned on a subscription basis, with members providing the funds by which the library continues to operate and buy new books. Yet, the re-founding of the library was not just the reemergence of a lapsed cultural institution during the post-war recovery, it was also a part of larger debates about the cultural resources necessary to sustain the new national government.

New York’s founding father -- by way of St. Croix and Nevis -— is in the midst of another comeback. An extraordinarily successful musical on Broadway, a debate about his place on the ten-dollar bill, and a great Gotham Center post about his impact on early American marine insurance law all provide new looks at one of the more contentious framers. But this is not the first revival of public interest in Alexander Hamilton. ​

Location of the Commons as overlaid on the “British Headquarters” map of 1782. The built up part of the city is shown in red

By Richard Howe

The newly American city of New York had no power to tax, though it could and did from time to time successfully petition the state legislature for permission to impose one-time taxes for specific purposes. The city’s regular sources of income were 1) the fees it could charge for wharfage, for recording births, deaths, marriages, wills, and conveyances of real property, and for issuing licenses and franchises; and 2) the rents it could obtain by leasing some of its rather extensive properties: the city was the biggest property owner on the island of Manhattan. The city could also raise money through the sale of its properties, the largest of which was the Commons, an unimproved and irregularly shaped parcel about three miles long and variously half a mile to a mile wide in the middle of the island, starting some two miles north of the built up part of the city—near the southwest corner of today’s Madison Square at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street -- and extending on up to the 1774 line dividing this New York Commons from the Harlem Commons north of it. All in all, the Commons amounted to some 1100–1200 acres, about 1.8 square miles, though in 1784 it had yet to be surveyed as such, so its extent was known only approximately.

By Kate Elizabeth BrownHamilton’s bustling practice exemplified a fundamental truth about marine insurance in American port cities like New York: the persistence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the legalities of insurance contracts, and the extensive maritime commerce they underwrote, particularly pressing and uncertain for the young republic.

In 1966, Milton M. Klein, a specialist in the history of colonial New York and early American law, commented on one of New York’s most important figures. “The history of New York,” Klein wrote, “would be a Hamlet without the prince.” But there was a problem: “no biography of this remarkable colonial politician has yet been written.” Nearly half a century later, James DeLancey, chief justice, lieutenant governor, and acting governor of New York, still does not have a biographer.[1]

Happy Constitution Day! 228 years ago today, September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention adjourned. With the new Constitution completed, the framers went to dinner at City Tavern before heading their separate ways and returning to their home states.